"Crowds and Democracy," by Stefan Jonsson

"Crowds and Democracy," by Stefan Jonsson

Read an excerpt from the chapter "Introducing the Masses," from "Crowds and Democracy: The Idea and Image of the Masses from Revolution to Fascism," by Stefan Jonsson

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Introducing the Masses
vienna, 15 july 1927
1. Shooting Psychosis
There was no question of issuing any warning before the firing started. The panic, which now arose, is beyond description.
At eight o’clock in the morning of the fifteenth of July, 1927, Vienna’s electricity workers switched off the gas and electricity supply to the city.1 Public transportation, communication, and production came to a complete halt. It was a signal: People left their work places and living quarters and began marching toward the parliament. Joining them halfway was Elias Canetti, later to become one of Austria’s most distinguished writers and a Nobel laureate: “During that brightly illuminated, dreadful day,” he wrote, “I gained the true picture of what, as a crowd, fills our century.”2 The march was sparked by a court judgment concerning a killing that had occurred on January 30 of the same year in Schattendorf, a village in Austria’s Burgenland near the Hungarian border.3 A group of social democrats had marched through town. Throughout the 1920s, such manifestations took place almost every Sunday in nearly every town and village of Austria,
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a country split between the socialist movement and that of radical conservatives supporting the governing coalition and often organized in the local defense corps, the Heimwehr. As the Schattendorf social democrats passed the tavern of Josef Tscharmann, the watering hole for a gang of right-wing vigilantes called the Frontkämpfer, the Front Fighters, rifles were fired from a window. Matthias Csmarits, a worker and war veteran, and Josef Grössing, an eight-year old boy, were shot in the back and killed. On the fourteenth of July, the jury of the district court in Vienna pronounced its verdict. The accused were the two sons of the innkeeper, Josef and Hieronymus Tscharmann, and their brother-in-law, Johann Pinter, all members of the Frontkämpfer. It was incontestable that they had fired at the demonstrators. They had confessed this themselves. It was incontestable that two people had died. The verdict of the jury was “not guilty.”4 “A Clear Verdict,” declared the Reichspost, the organ of the governing party, the following morning. “The murderers of the workers acquitted,” ran the first-page headline of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, the major social-democratic newspaper, which published a fuming editorial by Friedrich Austerlitz. “The bourgeois world is constantly warning of a civil war; but is not this blatant, this provocative acquittal of people who have killed workers, for the reason that they were workers, already by itself a civil war?”5 Austerlitz expressed the sentiments of the working classes in Vienna, and this day they acted in accord with their passions. Their demonstration was not preceded by planning or announcements. It caught the leaders of all political parties off guard.6 The immediate goal of the workers was to voice their dissent in front of the parliament. Before reaching their destination, they were struck down by mounted police. Many began to arm themselves with rocks and sticks (see figure 1.1). The police responded by making arrests and brought the captured to their quarters on Lichtenfelsgasse. Demonstrators next attacked this station to force the release of the detained, overpowering the police and setting the building on fire. Meanwhile, the police had lined up outside the nearby Palace of Justice, on the assumption that this symbolic seat of the law was the demonstrators’ primary goal but not realizing that, by now, the police force itself had become the target. Attacking the police chain, the demonstrators besieged the Palace of Justice and forced their way into the building, some carrying containers with gasoline. At 12:28, the fire department received the first emergency call from the flaming Palace of Justice (see figure 1.2). Fire engines were promptly
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Figure 1.1 Mounted police fighting violent demonstrators with cobblestones and sticks, Vienna, 15 July 1927. Unidentified photographer. Source: Austrian National Library.
ÖNB/Vienna. 449671-B.
Figure 1.2 The burning Palace of Justice, Vienna, 15 July 1927. Unidentified photographer. Source: Austrian National Library. ÖNB/Vienna. 229.324-B.
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dispatched, but the crowd—its number now exceeding 200,000—refused to let the vehicles pass. The chief of state, Ignaz Seipel, and the chief of police, Johann Schober, decided to arm 600 officers with rifles and gave them order to march toward the turmoil. Around 2:30, just as the demonstrators had yielded way to the fire engines, the police started shooting. By this time, Otto Bauer, the leading theorist of Austro-marxism and chairman of the Social Democratic Party, had reached the site: I and some of my friends saw the following. A lineup of security officers progressed from the direction of the opera toward the parliament, a true lineup, one man beside the other separated by one to two and a half steps. At this time Ringstrasse was empty and only at the other side of Ringstrasse a couple of hundred people were standing, not demonstrators but curious onlookers who had been watching the burning Palace of Justice. Among them were women, girls, and children. Then one unit approaches, I saw them move forward, rifles in hand, persons who for the most part had not learned to shoot, even when firing they leaned the butt against their belly and fired left and right, and if they saw any people—there was a small group in front of the building of the School Council and a larger one in the direction of the Parliament—then they fired at them. The people were seized by frantic fear; for the most part, they had not even seen the unit. We saw people running away in blind fear, while the guards were shooting at them from behind.7 Gerhard Botz, the principal historian of the July events in Vienna, speaks of a “shooting psychosis.”8 The police shot demonstrators, spectators, and their own. They fired at men and women, at children and the elderly, at fire engines and ambulances. When calm was restored, eighty-five civilians and four police officers had been killed, and more than one thousand people were injured (see figure 1.3). One of the responsible officials, vice chancellor Karl Hartleb, admitted that the scene sometimes looked like a rabbit hunt.9 It was soon revealed that the ammunition distributed to the officers were so-called dumdum bullets, with uncased noses designed to expand upon contact with the target. The doctors attending to the wounded in Vienna’s hospitals related horrendous sights of bodies with wounds that appeared to have been inflicted from a distance of less than one meter.10
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Figure 1.3 “Victims of the Day of Horror.” Postcard commemorating about half the victims of police violence on 15 July 1927 in Vienna. Source: Collection of Stefan Jonsson.
Copyright 1927: Fotograf Wilhelm Müller, Vienna. Photo: David Torell.
It was a price worth paying for the restoration of order, the bourgeois establishment of Austria believed. The Automobile Club of Austria expressed their gratitude by donating 5,000 schillings to the police. The chief of police likewise received financial compensation from the Association of Bankers, the Central Association of Industry, and the Chamber of Commerce. The Grand Hotel in Vienna reassured potential guests that the “unfortunate events”—“instigated by communists”—would in no way affect the comfort offered to foreign visitors. Dozens of police officers were decorated with medals of honor, tokens with which the upper classes encouraged the force that had protected their idea of society.11 Meanwhile, communists and left-wing social democrats believed that the July events were the sign of an imminent revolutionary situation. Soon, they thought, they would take advantage of the opening to realize their idea of society. The fifteenth of July 1927 saw the breakdown of the democratic forms that had until then contained the political passions of Austria’s postimperial
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society. Created by the decree of the victors of World War I, the young republic was ruled by a Christian conservative government that had barely managed to stake a course through the postwar chaos. Thanks to the parliamentary cooperation of the social democrats, the government had resolved the crises caused by the destruction of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, establishing between the working classes and the bourgeoisie a precarious equilibrium that held off the threat of civil war and gave the democratic institutions room to maneuver. July 1927 changed all this. From now on, the upper classes would associate the workers’ idea of a good society with the raging masses or the Bolshevik revolution, and these masses would see, in the burghers’ idea of a good society, the flashing muzzle of a gun. Yet what emerged from the ashes of this class struggle was a vision of society that triumphed over both socialists and conservatives: a fascist front, superior to the socialists in mobilizing the people and better than the conservatives in maintaining social order. For the only force to truly benefit from the July events was the Heimwehr, the local militias. In order to consolidate the regime against the socialist threat, Austrian authorities, private donors, and the fascist governments of Italy and Hungary increased their financial and political support of this paramilitary force.12 The Heimwehr thus grew into a political force that could gradually realize its fascist ideal of an Austria purged of Reds and Jews. In sum, the fifteenth of July 1927 was a turning point in Austria’s history.13
2. Not a Word About the Bastille
On Stadiongasse he jumped up on the heap of stones, which was there at the time, opened his coat, stretched out his arms widely, and shouted to charging security forces: “Shoot here, if you dare to!” And the unthinkable happened. The forces fired a volley at the defenseless man—covered in blood, he fell down on the stone heap.
“Fifty-three years have passed, and the agitation of that day is still in my bones,” Elias Canetti remarks in his memoirs. “It was the closest thing to a revolution that I have physically experienced. Since then, I have known quite precisely that I would not have to read a single word about the storming of the Bastille.”14 Canetti was so influenced by his experience that he spent the larger part of his life investigating the behavior of “the masses.”
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His investigation was not concluded until 1960, when he presented the results of his research in Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power), one of the most ambitious works of twentieth-century intellectual history, and maybe the most enigmatic. If Canetti today is regarded as the very model of the solitary intellectual struggling to understand crowd behavior and collective delusions, we must not forget that his efforts were part of a collective undertaking. In political life as in social life, “the masses” has become a battle cry, wrote German theologian Paul Tillich in 1922.15 Virtually every thinker, writer, scholar, artist, filmmaker, and journalist of Weimar Germany and Austria’s first republic was preoccupied by or obsessed with the masses. All of them struggled with or against the masses. Some of them elaborated full-blown social theories and aesthetic programs, not to speak of political organizations and ideologies, on the basis of the social agent that they designated by that term. In all areas of interwar society, the mass was seen as the mother of all problems, if it was not seen as a promise of all solutions. The masses? “No one could avoid encountering them on streets and squares,” writes Siegfried Kracauer in his history of the German film, recalling the situation after World War I. “These masses were more than a weighty social factor; they were as tangible as any individual. A hope to some and a nightmare to others, they haunted the imagination.”16 What was the nature of this agent? Why were “mass” and “crowd” deemed as fitting denominations for it? How come all branches of European art, culture, knowledge, and politics of this period worried so deeply about it? How come intellectuals and artists of no matter what background unanimously asserted that the masses, as novelist Alfred Döblin put it, were “the most enormous fact of the era?”17 The following pages will analyze, discuss, and explain the production and recycling of the category of the mass in interwar Europe. We will see that the mass functioned as a description of a certain social agent—an agent, however, whose true nature was highly disputed and whose location in the social terrain remained uncertain. But we will also discover that the mass was a political idea and an aesthetic fantasy, in some cases even an ontological category, without any firm denotation in reality. The sheer ambiguity of the word goes some way toward explaining its frequency in the culture of the Weimar Republic and interwar Austria. In one magnum opus of Weimar sociology, Alfred Vierkandt lists all that was meant by the “mass” in the 1920s:
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1. Mass = followers as opposed to leaders, 2. Mass = average people as opposed to those above the average, 3. Mass = lower strata (uneducated) as opposed to higher strata (educated), 5. [sic!] Mass = uprising or any temporary association as opposed to group, 6. Mass = association, class, social stratum, race, or the like, where often no distinction is made whether what is meant is a group (as a totality) or a series of similar individual beings forming something like a species, 7. Mass = temporary association of people in a state of strong excitement (as in ecstasy or panic), in which self-consciousness and higher spiritual faculties strongly regress (and without sign of any collective consciousness in the sense of a community).18 When someone spoke of “the masses” in the 1920s, the statement may have been an expression of common prejudice against the lower classes, but it may also have been an expression of social anxiety brought on by the war, the economic crisis, the appearance of women in public affairs, the rapid industrialization, or the bad times in general. Moreover, the statement may have carried a scholarly pretension of explaining the current state of affairs, but it may also have been used to voice social criticism, to confess the speaker’s utopian aspirations, to argue for urban renewal, to assert that history was headed on the wrong path and that the world had become a dangerous place, or to warn against the degeneration of the human species and the German race. Whether the word intended one thing or another depended entirely on the context and attitude of the speaker. The word could, in fact, mean one thing just as well as another, which is why—and Vierkandt stressed this point—so many speakers found it so useful and adequate for expressing whatever social views and opinions they held. The first thing to realize about “the mass” as a term and about the masses as a social phenomenon in the interwar period, then, is that both were unclear and ambiguous. But the difficulty in asserting the meaning or nature of the mass should not be seen as a weakness on the part of those who spoke about the masses or as an error that could have been corrected by a more rigorous sociological and historical analysis. Instead of deploring or denying the contradictory references to the mass, the contradiction should be accepted, or even emphasized, as an indication and symptom of the historical predicament of interwar Germany and Austria. For the difficulty in defining the term reflects the greater difficulty in describing and
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representing the society that those who used the term sought to grasp. In the last instance, the conceptually confused and politically contested signification of “the mass” thus brings us face to face with a social and political crisis affecting the very mechanisms by which these societies sought to reconstruct themselves as coherent and meaningful political and cultural entities, thereby giving a meaning to their existence after the defeat and destruction suffered in World War I. “In the 1920s, the shakiness of the Weimar Republic demanded the urgent reinvention of politics and culture,” writes Michael Steinberg.19 Another historian, Eric Weitz, asserts that “Weimar politics were loud, contested, unruly, and strikingly democratic.” Parties and movements of all stripes could find representation in the Reichstag, and they all used the new media and new art forms of radio, photomontage, illustrated press, microphones, and film to carry their messages to the most remote corners of the country. “Politics became ‘mass’ in an unprecedent fashion.”20 The sociologist René König, describing the main hub and hothouse of the new situation, states that Berlin of the 1920s was “a focal point of social disorganization.”21 Similar assessments were given by many witnesses of the era: “The question as to what order is must in its most fundamental sense be posed anew. It must be understood that our life has become provisional, without any fixed point to rely on.”22 This was “a Republic of instability,” says historian Rudolf Morsey.23 A word for multiple purposes, “the mass” was indeed the ideal rhetorical vehicle for intervening into the struggles surrounding the overriding problem of Germany’s Weimar Republic and Austria’s first republic: how to circumscribe the new sovereign of the people? How to shape the content of the damaged and leaking container of the nation? How to understand democracy? In a word, how to reinvent politics? In this situation, the mass served as the preferred conceptual tool for social scientists; it was also the ideal slogan for politicians, and it was the chosen image for artists and writers, who all struggled to represent a society in flux and a people in upheaval. It would therefore be wrong to posit the Weimar or Viennese masses as pregiven facts of history that may be grasped and classified by the social scientist, reported by the journalist, visualized by the painter, pictured by the photographer, or narrated by the novelist. The meaning of the masses was shifting and multiple and always conditioned by the perspective of the observer. Strictly speaking, it is to be doubted whether the masses ever
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existed. Yet notwithstanding the problematic epistemological character of the term, it is certainly the case that it indicates a recurrent if not dominant theme of interwar European culture. Essentially, this theme concerns the problem of how society ought to be described, depicted, and represented, and by whom. The theme made itself manifest in two broad areas. First, in the political area, “the masses” were seen as the central problem, and sometimes also as the universal solution because of the violent legacy of the German revolution in 1918–1919 and the introduction of universal suffrage. The revolution and the ensuing unrest brought many German cities to a situation verging on civil war. Opposing classes, parties, militias, unions, and interest groups from all layers of society involved themselves in the struggles over the right way of representing the postimperial German nation. “The first days of the Republic were accompanied by bitter conflict, similar in nature to a civil war, between rival views as to the shaping of the new order; more adverse conditions for the foundation of a democracy can hardly be imagined,” states historian Eberhard Kolb.24 Most interpreters described these conflicts for political representation as a mass struggle or a struggle of the masses. This political instability set the pattern for years to come, and in all attempts to understand or reshape that pattern, the masses were the central concern. On this point the Right and the Left agreed: power was from now on linked to mass mobilization. The second area in which the masses became an obsessive issue was that of modern German culture itself, particularly its two newest and most dominant features: urban life and technologically mediated media, or mass media, as became the current term. For unlike other metropolitan centers in the West, it was not until the 1920s that the German society and its capital were transformed by the typical features of metropolitan life, all the way from heavy traffic and urban congestion to the rapid expansion of cinema, radio broadcasting, and illustrated print media. Some intellectuals thrived in this environment. Others were appalled; Joseph Goebbels described Berlin West and its main thoroughfare Kurfürstendamm as an area “of corruption and decay, . . . of inner emptiness and despair, with the patina of a Zeitgeist sunk to the level of the most repulsive pseudoculture.”25 In this context, too, development and change were explained as consequences of the new social form of the masses, whose tastes and habits were connected to the emergence of the cultural landscape of the metropolis.26 A new “cult of
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distraction” came into being, gathering around its arenas, cinemas, music halls, amusement parks, and similar venues a mass of customers now counted in thousands, if not millions. The major arena was of course the street itself—“stuffed full with people and more people . . . the black throng of people,” in Goebbels view. The street constituted a new theme for writers, artists, photographers, and filmmakers, and it also served as a new market place for printed mass media. In Berlin alone there were in 1929 no less than 2,633 magazines and journals, and 147 daily newspapers.27 In this situation, and politically as well as culturally, the masses became an argument unto itself. “The fact that there are four million Berliners cannot be overlooked,” Siegfried Kracauer summarized this crowded state of affairs.28 As Sabine Hake has analyzed in detail, the rapid rise of this German metropolis, planned and built to accommodate a new human subspecies called “the masses,” endangered the self-understanding of those members of the bourgeois public sphere most firmly committed to humanist ideals and the value of education, high art, literary culture, and individual Bildung.29 As is evident in German and Austrian architecture and urban planning, the masses were a collective subject that profoundly transformed the appearances and functions of the city itself.30 Another crucial aspect of the idea and image of the masses in the interwar period was their gendered nature. “Crowds are everywhere distinguished by feminine characteristics,” Gustave Le Bon had stated already in 1895.31 Drawing attention to this feature, Andreas Huyssen speaks of “Mass Culture as Woman,” explaining that around the turn of the last century public and scholarly discourse “consistently and obsessively genders mass culture and the masses as feminine.”32 As we shall see, the positing of the masses as feminine had to do with the fact that crowds and women alike were believed to lack rationality and self-control, and it was generally held that both acted in accord with their instincts and emotions. Since the emerging urban and popular culture seemed to target precisely such allegedly lower mental faculties of pleasure and sensations, this culture was frequently described as a symptom of an ominous process of feminization and massification, which entailed the disintegration of public life, the collapse of society, the symbolic castration of masculine authority, and a surge of revolutionary hysteria and emotional promiscuities of all kinds. Regulating or preventing this process became a priority for many interwar intellectuals and politicians. The methods employed included policies of crowd control
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and measures aimed to police and restrict women’s sexual and political emancipation, including a range of educational, biopolitical, and disciplinary initiatives and institutions.33 “The great Weimar intellectual and creative figures were, then, preoccupied with the meaning of ‘the masses’ and ‘mass society,’ ” concludes Eric Weitz.34 But this also means that an inquiry into the meaning of the masses in interwar German and Austrian culture easily broadens into a general history of these societies. This may be the reason that no one has yet produced a comprehensive analysis of the masses in Weimar Germany and Austria’s first republic. There are some excellent studies of the notion of the mass in the interwar period. But most of them are limited in scope because they study the “mass” either as a theoretical concept in sociology and social psychology or as a political idea promoted by totalitarian ideologies. Most of these studies also suffer from the same theoretical weakness and ideological ambiguity that marked the concept of “the masses” as it was usually defined in European culture of the interwar period. Thinkers and writers tended to define the (feminine) “masses” as the opposite term of an idealized norm of (male) individuality.35 Hence, the emergence of the masses was automatically judged as a threat to the ideals of individuality, personal cultivation, male identity, and rationality; as Paul Reiwald succinctly put it in his “handbook of mass psychology” of 1946: “The individual—or, rather, individuality— perishes in the mass.”36 Although later scholars have not always accepted this definition, or even have rejected it as unscientific, their critiques often remain framed by it.37 That is to say, they have only addressed the particular individualistic notion of “the masses,” that is, “the masses” as the opposite of individuality. While this approach is understandable—for it was this notion that dominated the scholarly and political jargon of the period—it fails to register that the interwar discourse on the masses also connoted a more multiple, malleable, and contradictory phenomenon than the one that thinkers and scholars tried to circumscribe in their conceptual systems.38 One of my aims in this book is to relate this dominant notion of the masses to the powerful images of the masses that circulated in the wider cultural, literary, and artistic field. I am especially interested in the masses represented in art, photography, cinema, literature, theater, dance, and architecture. For I am convinced that the aesthetic images of the mass in Weimar culture tell us far more about the political conflicts and historical predicament of this society than we are likely to pick up if we limit our
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interest to the references to the masses found in the scholarly and political context. References to the masses of the latter kind should be approached with suspicion, for even when they are presented to us as neutral sociological concepts they are notoriously vague, always defined in relation to other equally vague concepts such as individual, group, class, people, and organization. At best, the mass here figures as a pseudo-concept: a fiction disguised in the high jargon of social theory, a social theory ever biased by ideology, or a social classification colored by opinion. As a concept, “the mass” is therefore a meaningless term. As a historical sign, however, “the mass” is loaded with meaning. If we want a full idea of the historical dynamics of interwar Austria and Germany, of its aesthetic achievements, its radical experiments in cultural creativity and political organization, and its forces of destruction, there is no better way than to investigate the various meanings and roles attributed to the masses. The objective of this book is to bring all these images and ideas of the mass into a comprehensive analysis and coherent historical narrative. This narrative begins on November 23, 1895, when the sociologist Georg Simmel reviews Gustave Le Bon’s Psychologie des foules in the Viennese weekly Die Zeit. It ends in 1939, when the Austrian writer Hermann Broch submits a forty-page proposal to the Center for Advanced Study in Princeton, in which he demands that a Research Institute for the Study of Political Psychology and Mass Insanity be founded: “Everybody knows the insanity characterizing our time; but nobody knows the causes of this political madness.”39 Between 1895 and 1939 the meaning of “the mass” is taken to its limits. For Simmel, writing in 1895, the term operates within a limited field located between positivist sociology, clinical psychology, and public policy. For Broch, writing in 1939, the same term refers to metaphysical powers that govern the fate of humankind. All branches of knowledge, from criminology and pedagogics to demography and theology, must be coordinated to investigate this power, Broch argues. In fact, he wants the entire university system rebuilt to “fight the mass-psychological threat.”40 What happened between 1895 and 1939? We may have a rough idea about the historical processes behind the transformation. Yet it is not clear why these processes were deposited into the meaning of a word, “the mass.” Nor is it clear why this word came to absorb such huge quantities of intellectual and artistic energy. The efforts to understand the mass yielded a highly impressive list of works. To Broch’s Massenwahntheorie, we may add
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Sigmund Freud’s Massenpsychologie und Ich-analyse, Wilhelm Reich’s Die Massenpsychologie des Faschismus, Paul Tillich’s Masse und Geist, Theodor Geiger’s Die Masse und ihre Aktion, Siegfried Kracauer’s “Der Ornament der Masse,” Vilhelm Vleugels’s Die Masse, Arnold Zweig’s Caliban, oder Politik und Leidenschaften, Theodor W. Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality, and, somewhat later, Elias Canetti’s Masse und Macht and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. The analysis of the crowd was also furthered by sociologists such as Leopold von Wiese, Gerhard Colm, and Max Weber; by left-wing theorists like Georg Lukács, Rosa Luxemburg, Walter Benjamin, Karl Kautsky, and Bertolt Brecht; and also by right-wing thinkers such as Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, and Martin Heidegger. Not only writers and thinkers inquired into the problem of the mass. Consider the cinema, photography, architecture, visual arts, theater, and dance of the Weimar Republic: here, too, is a huge body of works expressing a firm conviction that the masses inaugurate a new era. For instance, a quick glance in the collections of any European museum of modern art provides sufficient grounds for realizing that numberless visual artists of the 1920s took the crowd as a new object of representation. Often simply entitled “Die Masse” or the like, these paintings and drawings show how the motif of masses prompted artists to invent new methods of representing society. The same pertains especially to German and Austrian film and performing arts of the interwar period. It exceeds the capacity of a single author to review this work in its totality. But the contours and properties of the totality may nonetheless be grasped by exploring a string of representative examples. In this way, it should be possible to identify not only the various meanings attributed to the masses in interwar culture but also the positions claimed by people who were dismissed as masses. What’s the point of my investigation? The 1920s was the era of the masses. Yet it is rarely recognized that the masses were of vastly different kinds. By stressing and examining the heterogeneity of the ideas and images of the masses in interwar Germany and Austria, we will better understand why these years were at once the most disastrous and the most creative of modern Western culture. It will also shed light on pressing political and cultural concerns of our present time. In line with historian Detlev Peukert’s conclusion to his interpretation of the Weimar Republic, we may here see Weimar Germany or Austria’s first republic as “an archetypal instance of the
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history of democracy: a compendium of democracy’s virtues as well as its vices,” which encourages us “to refine and elaborate our own traditions of democracy.”41 In this sense, we have hardly begun to digest the lessons that this culture transmitted to posterity through its lasting achievements and its horrendous failures. My aim, therefore, is not only to analyze and discuss some of the various ideas and images of the masses that circulated in interwar Germany and Austria. I also want to explain the prevalence and dominance of the masses in public discourse of that era. I will seek to do this by connecting the discourse on the masses to the “democratic problem” of that time, that is, the problem of representing the political passions and interests of the people in adequate political organizations, cultural institutions, and aesthetic forms. This approach has crucial implications. For if it is correct, it means that an understanding of the profoundly ideological figure of the masses in European history is indispensable not only for those interested in the history of populism, totalitarianism, fascism, and revolution, not only for those seeking to situate Weimar culture in relation to the grisly system that replaced it, but also for everybody concerned with the future of democracy. The richness and density of the discussion on the masses in interwar Europe must not be seen merely as a prelude to Nazism, Stalinism, and World War II, but as an archive of ideas about society and collective life that we have not yet fully worked through. Until recently, historical scholarship stated that the Weimar Republic was “doomed” from the outset as it harbored contradictions that its democratic constitution was unfit to resolve and thus inevitably resulted in dictatorship.42 Similarly, and all too often, the study of interwar ideas of the masses has been reduced to a study of fascism. Conversely, the study of Nazism has often been reduced to a study of the masses.43 The following chapters seek to correct this view by proposing that the masses also reveal the eternal problem of democracy. The historian Heinrich August Winkler emphasizes this point in his monumental history of the working-class movement in Weimar Germany: “At the center stands the question about the chances for success for Germany’s first democracy.”44 Buried inside each idea of the masses, then, is not necessarily a fascist, communist, or totalitarian kernel but simply an idea on how to represent society; how to channel socially significant passions into adequate political, cultural, and aesthetic forms; or how to understand and explain socially significant passions sociologically and psychologically. While many
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of the notions of the mass that circulated in interwar Germany and Austria functioned to block the broad majority from gaining representation, other notions explored ways to empower the demos, to put the people at the center of the picture.
3. Explaining the Crowd
I went up to the commander and yelled: ‘for God’s sake, at least avoid shooting at the ambulances! Not even during the war did anyone shoot at the Red Cross!’ The police officer replied: ‘With your permission, I’m shooting at the Red Cross!’
Around 1895 an entire scholarly discourse crystallized around the efforts to understand the collective behavior of human beings. According to the French and Italian social scientists that launched this discourse, the growing influence of crowds transformed all sectors of social life. Whether they spoke about railways, urban congestion, the introduction of the lay jury in legal proceedings, universal suffrage, athletic events, workers’ strikes, urban riots, the growing circulation of newspapers, poverty, or the expansion of primary schooling, they tended to see a common denominator behind them, neatly summarized by Gustave Le Bon in his book of that year: “The age we are about to enter will in truth be the era of crowds.”45 According to Le Bon and his colleagues, all that was new or emerging in society apparently involved collective action or gatherings of great numbers of people. They described these crowds as irrational and potentially violent, threatening everything that made civilized society possible. To understand the new era there was a great need for a general theory or a set of general concepts through which different crowds and different instances of crowd behavior could be systematically compared. A theory was constructed: mass psychology. Mass psychology drew its materials from many sources: Hippolyte Taine’s positivist and profoundly conservative history of modern France; Hippolyte Bernheim’s and Jean-Martin Charcot’s studies of insanity; Emile Zola’s naturalist inventory of the mores of the working classes; and the sociological theories of Gabriel Tarde, Victor-Alfred Espinas, and Henry Fournial, whose ideas evolved in close connection with the criminal anthropology of Italian social scientists like Scipio Sighele.46 The discourse
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was codified in Le Bon’s enormously successful Psychologie des foules from 1895, soon translated into English as The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind and also into many other languages. Primarily mediated by Le Bon, mass psychology was first applied by social technocrats, medical doctors, and military officers worrying about the health and discipline of workers, soldiers, and the working classes in general.47 Soon it came to influence the social sciences more generally, contributing not only to the constitution of social psychology, as in Wilhelm Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie (1900–1920), William McDougall’s The Group Mind (1908), and Sigmund Freud’s Mass Psychology and Analysis of the ‘I’ (1921; Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse), but also in Germany to the emerging theories of modernization that had been developed by the first generation of German sociologists, such as Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel. From this point on, and always with or against Nietzsche’s enduring “declaration of war against the masses,” the theory split into many directions, which I will discuss in due order and in depth throughout the following pages. As will be shown, mass psychology was assimilated with the political discourse of fascism. However, mass psychology also turned the opposite way, as it provided left-wing theory with instruments for analyzing fascist ideology. Furthermore, mass psychology merged with mainstream German sociology of the 1920s. And in the hands of independent thinkers and philosophers such as Elias Canetti, Hermann Broch, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Hannah Arendt, and others, the discourse was transformed into social theories in their own right. The wide diffusion of mass psychology and mass sociology encouraged a certain way of viewing and describing society, especially its emerging urban and proletarian milieus, which saturated journalism, social commentary, political discourse, and literature. Most important, mass psychology offered a convenient tool for explaining the social disorder and violent events that characterized the interwar period throughout Europe. German and Austrian politics was dominated by competing efforts to apprehend and control the social aspirations and political passions that frequently erupted in clashes among the working classes, fascist militias, and the apparatus of state violence. Those who wrote or spoke about these events usually singled out “the masses” as the cause of the unrest or quite simply as the villain. The July uprising in Vienna is a case in point. Most if not all observers of the burning of the Justizpalast conveniently explained the event
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as an expression of mass action. In their view, the violence of that day was a portent of the ultimate “rebellion of the masses,” as was the title of Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset’s best-selling book of the same year. To be sure, alternative explanations of the conflict also circulated in the public sphere, although they were pushed to the margin and silenced. Indeed, there are few historical events that have elicited such a rich intellectual aftermath as the fifteenth of July 1927. I have already mentioned Canetti, whose entire career was shaped by the demonstrations. First, he wrote the novel Auto-da-fe (Die Blendung, 1935), which literally relates how bourgeois culture burns to the ground, and then also his magnum opus, Crowds and Power (1960), which shows how great collectives possess an agency of their own, be it destructive or intelligent, independent of any kind of leadership. Sigmund Freud was not at home in Berggasse on the fifteenth of July but on vacation at Semmering. Reports about the violent uprising nonetheless found their way into his texts and affirmed his pessimistic outlook. Would man ever learn to live, without leaping at the throat of his neighbor? Also, in Robert Musil’s masterpiece The Man Without Qualities, the July insurrection is recorded in chapters about a spontaneous uprising that marks out the novel’s climax and turning point. Similar events haunt the characters in Hermann Broch’s trilogy Sleepwalkers, but transferred to a new setting in the German Revolution of November 1918. Heimito von Doderer, for his part, addressed the July events directly in his major novel The Demons (1956), which culminates in front of the burning Justizpalast. The person who was most profoundly influenced, however, was the publisher, critic, and playwright Karl Kraus. In a series of satirical essays, theater plays, and grammophone recordings, Kraus launched a campaign against the authorities that he held accountable for the violence. He collected reports and eyewitness accounts and published a massive volume of documents consisting of first-hand testimonials of what had occurred, some of which I have used as epigraphs for the sections in this first chapter. Let us return, then, to that bright and dreadful day, to see how it illuminates the specific presuppositions and prejudices contained in the discourse on the masses, as well as the historical and social concerns that may account for its enormous impact on interwar culture and society. And let us as our point of departure take another of the newspaper quotes collected by Kraus:
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The mob that heaved itself around the Palace of Justice, howling and eager to loot, had transformed itself into a swarm of hatred. Its rage had turned into the fear of the weak, its demand for revenge into cowardice. It crawled away into the alleys to take cover.48 Many observers of the fifteenth of July in Vienna believed that the spontaneous violence was a result of the primitive state of the laboring masses, a primordial and creaturely “mob” with terrifying qualities. Needless to say, this was a simplification, but one that was preferred by many as an escape from seemingly irresolvable conflicts. If we look at the background, the uprising appears to be the culmination of a situation that had been building up over many years. By 1927, Austria’s upper and middle classes and rural population had begun to benefit from the severe measures undertaken by the government to reorganize Austria’s economy after World War I and the inflation of 1923. In the working classes, by contrast, the rate of unemployment remained above 10 percent, and in the Vienna region, as high as 30.49 Another longterm cause of the demonstration was the accumulated effect of previous confrontations between socialists and right-wing radicals. On at least four occasions, social democrats had been killed or injured in such clashes. In all cases, the perpetrators had walked away unpunished.50 Austria’s working classes reckoned that the law was an instrument of class oppression. The workers’ discontent was magnified by the fact that this situation of unemployment and legal discrimination contradicted their expectations that empowerment was within reach. The labor unions and the Social Democratic Party controlled the material and institutional infrastructure of Vienna.51 Ernst Fischer, cultural editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung at the time of the July uprisings, described the party in his memoirs, asserting that “never before, and never since, has there been a social democratic party that was so strong, so intelligent, and so attractive as the Austrian party was in the mid1920s.”52 The support of the social democrats had increased with each new election, creating the hope that they would shortly rule by absolute majority. Still, in 1927 these expectations remained unrealized, partly because the Christian conservatives, noting the growth of the social democratic electorate, became increasingly unpliant. This class tension was, in turn, a legacy of Austria’s defeat in World War I and the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian empire. After the war, the political, administrative, and economic apparatus broke down, so much so
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that, with the treaty of St. Germain in 1919, as one historian puts it,“the whole raison d’être of Austria . . . seemed to have been irrevocably destroyed.”53 Historical and literary documents suggest that the citizens of the truncated state experienced the postwar years as a collective trauma.54 Large parts of the population did not trust the state as their representative. All sides reserved the right to arm themselves for future contingencies, conjuring up the specter of civil war as a pretext. Wealthy estate owners financed private armies. The right had its own paramilitary in the Heimwehr. The social democrats had a paramilitary wing in the so-called Schutzbund. On March 2, 1927, the conservative government attempted to disarm the Schutzbund, provoking a brief crisis that further increased the social democrats’ distrust of the authorities.55 Thus, the general political background of the demonstration on the fifteenth of July was a panorama of interlinked minor and major causes and motivations that were so complex and variegated that they would seem to preclude any unified explanation of the violent event. Even if they were all added together, we would still lack an explanation that could measure up to the tremendous impact of the event itself. Yet as many reports and accounts of the time seem to prove, it was precisely this lack of a coherent historical causality that tempted intellectuals and politicians to posit the agency of the masses or of a collective mind as an explanatory model. Only a homogeneous and unidirected force, they seemed to argue, would be able to cause such a massive effect. This indicates a general feature of the interwar discourse on the masses. The line that separated a psychology of the crowd from a metaphysics of the crowd was often a thin one. When stating that the crowd acts as one being, mass psychology delivered not a substantiated social theory but something comparable to the explanations found in mythology, where giant events are read as acts of giants. Consider the following description by Canetti: “It wants to consist of more people: the urge to grow is the first and supreme attribute of the crowd. It wants to seize everyone within reach; anything shaped like a human being can join it.”56 In mass psychology, whether in Le Bon, Tarde, Freud, or Canetti, social agency ceased to be a “he,” “she,” or “they.” Instead, social agency became an “it,” which was strangely plural. The mass psychologists had a name for the mysterious agency that drove men and women to coordinate and mimic the acts of one another. They called it a “collective soul.” They quarreled about the true nature of this soul
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of the masses. Some regarded it as an essential quality of all collectives; others saw it as a projected quality, introduced after the fact to explain collective human behavior. Whether a collective consciousness uniting all members of any given collective was really seen to exist or whether it was ascribed to them by external observers makes no great difference here. What is more crucial is that this interwar debate posited the collective soul as a theoretical figure, which turned the nebulous category of the mass into an intelligible phenomenon and which allowed for a conceptual analysis of it. Stated differently, the collective soul was a representation, conjured up by the observer’s need to explain an effect so immense that it far exceeded the combined agency of the innumerable agents and circumstances that caused it. Experiencing the July events, Canetti and others believed they saw a collective mind in action. “I became part of the crowd, I fully dissolved in it, I did not feel the slightest resistance to what the crowd was doing.”57 Yet, like all accounts of the crowd, Canetti’s is a reconstruction, noted down in afterthought by an individual working through his memories and ideas. As his memoirs reveal, Canetti’s thoughts on the crowd presupposed an ascetic and aesthetic isolation from the rest of humanity. Canetti here explains that his interest in the masses began a couple of years before the burning of the Justizpalast. His first ideas about the masses came to him as an “illumination” on a solitary walk in the winter of 1924–1925: It was night; in the sky, I noticed the red reflection of the city, and I craned my neck to look up at it. I paid no attention to where I was walking. I tripped several times, and in such an instant of stumbling, while craning my neck, gazing at the red sky, which I didn’t really like, it suddenly flashed through my mind: I realized that there is such a thing as a crowd instinct, which is always in conflict with the personality instinct, and that the struggle between the two of them can explain the course of human history.58 This flash of inspiration, Canetti asserts, propelled him to devote thirty-five years to the study of the crowd. He admits that he at this time did not know “what a crowd really is.”59 In order to find out what a crowd was, he isolated himself in a farmer’s house in the Alps, or this is at least what he relates in his memoirs. On his first morning in the alpine setting, he sat down at a table in the garden, taking out the only book he had brought along, Freud’s
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Mass Psychology and Analysis of the ‘I.’ Embarking on his revision of Freud’s theory, the twenty-year-old Canetti was to replace Freud’s sexual drive with what he calls the Massentrieb, or “crowd instinct.” Freud and Le Bon had been blind, he believed. Neither thinker had known the crowd from the inside. As for Canetti, “I had never forgotten how gladly one falls prey to the crowd. . . . I saw crowds around me, but I also saw crowds within me.”60 Yet Canetti’s intention to represent the crowd from within, as an experiential phenomenon, is called into question by his account of his own intellectual procedure. “I had made up my mind,” he writes, to “have the crowd before me as a pure, untouched mountain, which I would be the first to climb without prejudices.”61 Canetti here figurally repeats the mental operation of his adversaries, Le Bon and Freud, because his descriptions betray that his theory, too, presupposes a radical separation of the rational mind from the passionate masses. Interestingly, Canetti states that it was during these days of hard discipline, divided between Freud’s mass psychology and solitary mountain hikes, that he became a true individual: “During those days I also won my independence as a person.”62 Quite literally, Canetti gains mastery as an individual by intellectually conquering the masses. Canetti’s passage shows how his first attempts to analyze the crowd were predetermined by a certain conceptual structure that is characteristic of mainstream mass psychology from its inception in the 1890s and through the 1920s. As a consequence, the crowd comes across less as a transparently described actuality than as a reflection of the conceptual limitations that govern the analysis. A first limitation is obvious enough to go unnoticed: mass psychology presupposes a radical distanciation from its object. Cannetti fantasizes having the masses before him as an untouched mountain. Le Bon and the French mass psychologists regularly described the masses as a remote people, if not as a savage tribe. Canetti’s example also reveals a second conceptual limitation, typical of most writings on the mass: the mass was always constituted in opposition to a notion of individual reason. Consider the following statement of Le Bon: “The substitution of the unconscious action of crowds for the conscious activity of individuals is one of the principal characteristics of the present age.”63 Le Bon asserted that the individual is related to the crowd as conscious activity is related to unconscious action. The precondition of such a characterization is the Cartesian concept of the individual as defined by consciousness. For Descartes, the opposite of consciousness was the passions.64
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The mass psychologists repeated the same distinction. Assuming that the individual was characterized by consciousness, and that the crowd was the opposite of the individual, they concluded that the crowd must be characterized by what was opposite to consciousness, that is, by unconscious passions. Thus, as long as human nature was defined in terms of rationality, and as long as rationality was defined in terms of individual consciousness, the crowd would, by default, come across as an agent of passions. Stated differently, the definition of the masses as a matter characterized by its passions was an inverted mirror image of the definition of the individual as a mind characterized by reason. In this context, the crowd occupied a position analogous to that of the primitive, the feminine, the infant, and the barbarian, all of them instances of the Other of Western rationality and all of them being linked by a shared definiens: the passions. From Gustave Le Bon until our day, “the masses” has been a term pressed into service whenever the theoretician has addressed social processes that seem to erode differences, challenge authorities, and unmake rational distinctions. “The mass” has always been the eclipse of reason and the enemy of the well-ordered polis. What all this amounts to is that most efforts to analyze “the masses” are intrinsically connected to the problem of representing the passions. As a site of malleable passions, the crowd cannot represent itself coherently. It calls for representation by someone who can grasp its true nature and present it in intelligible form, notably the intellectual. Moreover, the crowd calls for political representation by someone who can speak on its behalf and convert its passions into political demands, notably the leader, Führer, or party. The crowd cannot speak; it screams. And its screams must be translated into rational speech by an individual acting as its representative.
4. Representing Social Passions
Just as she was kneeling down over the wounded, the fatal bullet was fired and crushed the back of her head.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt asserted that the masses are strangers to the arena in which political matters are rationally resolved. This is the reason the masses were a crucial factor in bringing totalitarian movements to power in the wake of World War I not just in communist